First Listen

13.May.09

Wilco didn’t let Tuesday night’s leak of their upcoming seventh full length Wilco (The Album) percolate for too long before they reached out to let the law-abiding half of their rabid fanbase in on all the hullabaloo.

Wednesday morning, the Chicago six-piece greeted early risers with a low-quality full album stream of Wilco (The Album) on their website. By mid-afternoon, they’d added a feature to stream at a higher bit rate.

On the first few listens, the album’s sound seems to fall somewhere between the avant garde cacophony of A Ghost is Born — especially during the first half — and the traditional, breezy rock of 2007’s Sky Blue Sky. Early highlights include the noisy, uptempo “Bull Black Nova”, double-tracked folk tune “Solitaire” and Beatles-esque closer “Everlasting”. But really the album plays pretty solid all the way through.

Wilco also issued this statement in an apparent showing of good sportsmanship:

“Well, we made it nearly a month with copies of Wilco (the album) floating around out there before it leaked. Pretty impressive restraint in this day and age. But the inevitable happened last night. Since we know you’re curious and probably have better things to do than scour the internet for a download (though we do understand the attraction of the illicit), we’ve posted a stream of the full album… Feel free to refer to it as Wilco (the stream) if you must.

“We also have our usual guilt abatement plan for downloaders. If you have downloaded the record, we suggest you make a donation to one of the band’s favorite charities, the Inspiration Corporation — an organization we’ve supported in the past & who are doing great work in the city of Chicago. Information and donation button here: http://inspirationcorp.org/.”